Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to automated monitoring and reporting systems, and more particularly to a monitoring and reporting system that includes a targeted surveillance system with a mini-screen dashboard.
Related Art
Healthcare monitoring and reporting systems use dashboards to monitor patient populations and workflow processes of the healthcare staff for circumstances where intervention is necessary. These dashboards are typically built on databases employing open source interface standards to aggregate structured and unstructured data from multiple points of entry. They then poll that database on a scheduled time period looking for specific criteria that may be of interest to the clinicians utilizing the dashboard. Examples of various patient monitoring and clinical workflow systems are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,774,215 and 8,510,126 and in US Pat. Pub. No. 2012/0095778 which are incorporated by reference.
These dashboards generally display on a large screen monitor in a central location. They are typically made to take over the entire screen and force that screen to serve a single purpose in displaying the desired information about the relevant patient population. Because they are in a central location and visible to a large number of personnel, they are forced into only displaying information that is relevant to the entire population of medical personnel for whom the dashboard will be visible.
For this reason, these dashboards are generally built to address a few global issues (rooms that are ready to be cleaned or have patients to be placed there; patients that have medications that are due to be administered; patients that have pushed the call button and require nurse attention etc). Traditional dashboards are also only visible when the personnel seeking information are in the central location and looking at the screen on which the dashboard is displayed or when the user specifically requests a view of the dashboard. Because the dashboards are designed to be the only thing easily viewable on the screen, it does not enable the push of information while clinicians are engaged in other activities and the workflow application is not running. These details limit the utility of the dashboard to be able to focus on the specific needs of individual staff members while at the same time limiting access to the information available in the dashboard.
Also, recognizing that monitoring multiple patients may make it more challenging for healthcare providers to read the physiological parameters for all of the patients, the Gross '778 Published Application describes a system that expands and collapses display sectors depending on the information being provided. However, the expanding and collapsing of display sectors is still based on the basic concept that the status indicators themselves for each one of the patients must be displayed rather than collecting the status indicators in a way that can minimize the display to a fraction of the display required for monitoring the individual status indicators.
Outside of healthcare, applications that communicate information that may be of interest to a specific person have overcome the above issues by utilizing a much smaller section of the screen's available space to convey information. Typically, the application displaying this information is transparent to the point of being unobtrusive to the user experience unless the user moves the cursor over the application displaying the information. At this point it becomes opaque and the user can interact with the application to drill down for more detailed information. Another format of these applications is to place one or more active elements in the system tray or taskbar that is typically located along the edge of the desktop display (usually at the bottom, although some systems allow the taskbar to be relocated along the side or at the top of the desktop display). Examples of the above technology can be seen in weather gadgets which draw on databases to display current weather conditions, forecasts and other weather related items. Some of these weather gadgets may be displayed over any application that is open on the desktop while other weather gadgets may be displayed in the taskbar. Other examples of such gadgets are the system icons for a computer, such as the date/time information, printer status, power management, and other control panel items that periodically change. With some of these gadgets, alerts may be temporarily displayed and then disappear. Other alerts may stay displayed on the screen until the user clears the alert screen by selecting the close-display button.
Although these weather gadgets and computer gadgets are able to dynamically receive and graphically display information from a database system and may even permit the user to customize their own unique display and provide limited information to the system about their preferences, such as the user's location and types of alert messages the user wants to receive, these previously known gadgets are not used as a part of an overall workflow process which requires the coordination between multiple individuals having a variety of different roles and functions in the workflow process. Accordingly, these known gadgets have mostly a one-way flow of information from the system to the use and are not interactive with the user. Additionally, these known gadgets are not selecting surveillance information for the user based on their role and function in any workflow process that is shared with other users.
It is also known to have control rooms with one or more central dashboard displays or video walls and individual technicians have more specialized dashboards at their respective stations with information directed to their particular functions and roles within the overall organization. Examples of such control rooms are found in a number of industries in addition to healthcare, such as aviation and space, power generation, communications, broadcasting, manufacturing controls, policing, military, customer service, order processing and fulfillment, etc. These control room dashboards are based on the central location model with distributed specialty stations, and even the specialized dashboards at the technicians' stations are designed to be the primary display on the screen. In fact, in many systems where a technician may need to perform other work in addition to monitoring their dashboard screen, they either use a second screen or they are provided with a large display screen with a split screen so that the view of the dashboard is not impeded. Although these control room and dashboard systems certainly communicate information to the overall central control room as well as the technicians' stations, they do not enable the push of information to the individual technicians' stations to change an unobtrusive display of a particular selection of surveillance criteria based on the respective roles of the technicians where the unobtrusive display partially overlays other displays that are on the respective screens of the individual users. In the particular example of a technician with more than one screen so that a dashboard can have its own entire screen, even though all of the information is provided on the dashboard display, it would be beneficial to have certain critical dashboard information also shown on the non-dashboard screen as a foreground overlay or foreground taskbar. This could be particularly helpful if time-sensitive alerts are periodically displayed on the dashboard screen, especially if the technician has other duties that occasionally require their attention be directed to the other screen, such as composing an e-mail message regarding upcoming maintenance of one of the systems being monitored or working on a status report, or the technician may even have to leave their station for a period of time, such as to physically check on one of the systems.